Knowledge
by peppermint quartz
Summary: From the moment he entered the bar, I knew he would be an interesting person. Pre-SS arc. Characters and franchise don't belong to me.


**A/N: Bleach is not mine. Sort of related to another fic, _Expectations. _BL within.**

Somehow I know, from the very first glance, that he is an interesting guy.

I am not going to seduce him. Why do I need to? They all fall at my feet, one by one by one, and one by one by one I reject them. They are coarse brutes, most of them, and I shudder to imagine their hands on me.

But this one is rather different. For one thing, he has a good-looking face with a confident – arrogant – smirk that adds to his charisma. The not-overly-muscled physique hints of a street fighter; the way he moves tells me he likes being challenged; the fact that he's alive means he's pretty damn strong.

Good. He may be the one who can keep up with me.

He sweeps his gaze over the patrons in this dingy bar, and I know he has seen me. His mouth curves into a smile that screams his desire. As he leans in to chat with the barkeep I toss back another round of the horrible rotgut they sell here.

I watch almost amusedly as his face falls: he has learned I am not a girl.

A drunk staggers over to the bar and knocks the new arrival's drink over. I lean back and cross my legs: a show should be about to start.

As expected, the drunk snarls into the new guy's face and swings a shoddy punch. New guy – mentally I dubbed him Lickable – dodges easily and trips the drunk man over.

Bad move. The drunk has friends.

Said friends all lumber up to the bar. The barkeep hides the breakables and the brawl begins. I yawn: nothing I haven't seen before. Night after night, I walk from bar to bar, seeking something I have yet to identify. The number of brawls I've witnessed already outnumbers the digits assigned to this hellhole. Where am I now? Seventy-seven? Seventy-eight?

A cup flies in my direction and I bat it away nonchalantly. Another missile comes my way and this time it is a burly man. I shove him aside and he staggers as he hits the wall.

"Why you little bit-" he begins before my cloth-covered fist smashes in his mouth.

I smile coldly. "I don't like crude language. Bite your tongue, hmm?" I take his gurgling as an agreement. Just as I am about to make my exit Lickable collides with me and I brace myself against the bar.

He glances up, looks me in the eye. "Hey," he says with a wide, devil-may-care grin. Then he winks and rejoins the fray, yelling some obscenities as he pummels whichever body he hits. Someone is ejected from the crowd and almost knocks into me, but I sidestep smartly and stamp hard on a thick calf which almost trips me. The yell is too girly by half; I grimace with distaste.

Lickable tosses out a thug who smashes into a chair. The thug grabs a broken chair leg. Before he could bring it down on Lickable's head, I reach over and twist the thug's wrist. The thug growls and turns to try swinging a punch at me instead. I sigh inwardly; their attacks were too obvious. I lift a knee and kicks him in the stomach, so hard that he ends up sprawled face up over a table.

Irritated by the dust that is settling on my clothes, I decide to leave the place. Lickable chooses that moment to crash into the door and now he and the original drunk are scrabbling across the entryway.

I am not about to stride over two rolling fighting men, so I haul them both up and unleashed a right hook across the jaw of the taller one.

Lickable is smart: he nods an apology and returns to deck the last two men still standing. His uppercut and left hook are pretty impressive.

Then he turns and grins at me again. He has a bleeding lip, an eye that looks about to bruise into an ugly purple, and he still looks utterly ravishable.

_Hmm. I like this one. This one has promise._

He saunters over and places a hand on the wall. I tilt my head, ready to consider his pickup line. He licks the bleeding cut and then cocks his head, slightly closer to me. "Hey babe."

I narrow my eyes. _Wrong terminology._ Then I jabbed my elbow into his gut and hit him on the nose. As he groans and doubles over, I kicked his left shoulder until he is staring up at me. I glare down.

"I am not 'babe'," I state coldly. "The name is Ayasegawa Yumichika."


End file.
